hu·brisˈ(h)yo͞obrəs/noun: hubris 1. excessive pride or self-confidence.

Nemesis, by Alfred Rethel (1837)

The new year opens with an old story, as The Independent headlines that Facebook multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg (perhaps finding himself in a crisis of work/life balance) will “build [a] robot butler to look after his child” [sic: those of us who watch Downton Abbey know that childcare is not included in the self-respecting butler’s job description; even the account of divisions of labour among the servants is garbled here], elaborating that “The Facebook founder and CEO’s resolution for 2016 is to build an artificially intelligent system that will be able to control his house, watch over his child and help him to run Facebook.” To put this year’s resolution into perspective, we learn (too much information) that “Mr. Zuckerberg has in the past taken on ‘personal challenges’ that have included reading two books per month, learning Mandarin and meeting a new person each day.” “Every challenge has a theme,” Zuckerberg explains, “and this year’s theme is invention” (a word that, as we know, has many meanings).

We’re reminded that FB has already made substantial investments in AI in areas such as automatic image analysis, though we learn little about the relations (and differences) between those technologies and the project of humanoid robotics. I’m reassured to hear that Zuckerberg has said “that he would start by looking into existing technologies,” and hope that might include signing up to be a follower of this blog.  But as the story proceeds, it appears in any case that the technologies that Z has in mind are less humanoid robots, than the so-called Internet of things (i.e. networked devices, presumably including babycams) and data visualization (for his day job). This is of course all much more mundane and so, in the eyes of The Independent’s headline writers, less newsworthy.

The title of this post is of course the most obvious conclusion to draw regarding the case of Mark Zuckerberg; in its modern form, ‘hubris’ refers to an arrogant individual who believes himself capable of anything. And surely in a political economy where excessive wealth enables disproportionate command of other resources, Zuckerberg’s self-confidence is not entirely unwarranted. In this case, however, Zuckerberg’s power is further endowed by non-investigative journalism, which fails to engage in any critical interrogation of his announcement. Rather than questioning Zuckerberg’s resolution for 2016 on the grounds of its shaky technical feasibility or dubious politics (trivializing the labours of service and ignoring their problematic histories), the Independent makes a jump cut to the old saws of Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Ex Machina. Of course The Independent wouldn’t be the first to notice the film’s obvious citation of Facebook and its founder and CEO (however well the latter is disguised by the hyper-masculine and morally degenerate figure of Nathan). But the comparison, I think, ends there and of course, however fabulous, neither Zuckerberg nor Facebook are fictional.

The original Greek connotations of the term ‘hubris’ referenced not just overweening pride, but more violent acts of humiliation and degradation, offensive to the gods. While Zuckerberg’s pride is certainly more mundane, his ambitions join with those of his fellow multibillionaires in their distorting effects on the worlds in which their wealth is deployed (see Democracy Now for the case of Zuckerberg’s interventions into education).  And it might be helpful to be reminded that in Greek tragedy excessive pride towards or defiance of the gods lead to nemesis. The gods may play a smaller role in the fate of Mark Zuckerberg, however, and the appropriate response I think is less retributive than redistributive justice.